Homily
for the
26th
Sunday of Ordinary Time
Sept.
29, 2024
Creed
St.
Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our
Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
“I believe in
one Lord Jesus Christ” (Nicene Creed).
Two weeks ago,
we considered our belief that Jesus Christ is God’s “Only Begotten Son,” God
from all eternity, true God like his Father.
Jesus anointed by the Holy Spirit
at his baptism (Perugino)
Our profession
of faith speaks next of the Son’s relationship with us as a human being. We might note that his personal name is
Jesus—Jesus of Nazareth. “Christ” isn’t
his last name but a title, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah,
which means “anointed one.” In the Old
Testament, kings and priests were anointed, as well as sacred objects like
altars. We’ve preserved that practice in
the New Testament, anointing Christians at Baptism and Confirmation, priests
and bishops at ordination, the sick, and altars and other sacred objects. Jesus of Nazareth was anointed not with oil
but directly by the Holy Spirit for God’s particular mission of consecrating
the human race to God after we sinned—the work of redemption.
Thus the Creed
states that the Son of God “came down from heaven for us men and for our
salvation.” “For us men” is generic,
all-inclusive: anthropos in Greek
and homo in Latin[1];
for human beings of both sexes, of every nation, every race, every age, of all
time.
He came “for
our salvation.” We need to be
saved. Any observation of the world
shows that it’s a mess—a mess caused by our sins of pride, greed, violence, and
indifference to others. God intended and
still desires something else entirely:
that we live in a harmonious relationship with him and with one another,
all of us as his beloved children—in this life and forever. Sin must be destroyed, and its effects
destroyed as well. That’s why the Son
“came down from heaven.”
That’s
symbolic language. The Hebrews and other
ancient peoples pictured heaven as high above us, using the same word for
“heaven” and “sky.” We still speak of
the heavens above. Heaven, of course,
isn’t a geographical place. One of the
1st Russian cosmonauts in the 1960s attempted to mock believers by reporting
that in outer space he’d looked around for God but hadn’t seen him. Of course not! God dwells everywhere, and those who are
close to him in love and friendship are in heaven, at least in a way of
speaking.
The Creed
tells us that the Son left his separate existence at his Father’s side—symbolic
language—where he was apart from creation, and he entered creation, this lower
state of existence where we humans dwell.
“By the Holy
Spirit he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.”
Incarnate means “in flesh.”
God the Son, divine and invisible, existing spiritually as God from
eternity, entered time, entered history as a human being. His taking on human flesh meant he became a
real human being, flesh and bone and blood like every man and woman. In the 1st 3 centuries of Christianity, there
were some who maintained that human nature was unworthy of God, and the Son
couldn’t possibly have let himself be contaminated by our flesh; therefore,
Jesus of Nazareth was only apparently a man, more like an angel or a
phantom. No, the council of Nicea
insists, God really took on our flesh and blood. The blood stains on the Shroud of Turin,
which many believe was the burial shroud of Jesus, reveal that he had AB+
blood.
The divine
person of the Son of God assumed our human nature and all that it means to be
human—body, mind, soul, and feelings. The
4th Eucharistic Prayer affirms, “Made incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of
the Virgin Mary, he shared our human nature in all things but sin” (cf. Heb
4:15).
The Son of God
“became man.” This again is generic: a human; it doesn’t refer to Jesus’ being
male. The Latin text of the Creed is, “Et homo factus est,” as in homo sapiens, the genus and species of the human
race.
Gabriel announces Jesus' coming to Mary
(Apollonio di Giovanni)
In Jesus’
case, uniquely among all the members of homo sapiens, his conception is the
work of the Holy Spirit; “by the Holy Spirit [he] was incarnate,” not by St.
Joseph or anyone else. When the archangel
Gabriel asked the Virgin Mary to become Jesus’ mother, she told the angel
plainly that she’d had no relations with any man. Gabriel responded, according to St. Luke’s
Gospel: “The Holy Spirit will come upon
you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called
holy, the Son of God” (1:34-35). The
human component in Jesus’ conception and birth is solely the Virgin
Mary’s. In his public ministry, Jesus
worked many miracles. But the 1st
miracle is his conception in Mary’s womb without any male intervention.
But the Creed isn’t
concerned with Jesus’ public ministry.
It leaps directly from his incarnation to his passion, death, and
resurrection: “For our sake he was
crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and [he] rose
again on the third day.”
Secular
historians and archeological evidence inform us that Pontius Pilate was
governor of Judea from 26 to 36 A.D. The
Romans used crucifixion as a particularly painful, shameful, and degrading
method of execution for those they considered the scum of society: slaves, murderers, rebels, and outlaws. (Watch the end of the movie Spartacus
sometime.) This is the suffering and
death to which Jesus submitted “for our sake.”
After suffering all that it means to be human—growing pains, submission to parental authority, frustration with his followers, grief at a friend’s death, and pain of body and soul—Jesus died, as every man and woman must. The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we have a high priest (one who offers sacrifice for us) who’s able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he’s been tested in every way that we are (4:15).
And he was
buried. Some skeptics have proposed that
Jesus wasn’t really dead. The Romans
were expert executioners, and before releasing his body for burial, they made
sure he was dead by jabbing a spear thru his ribs into his lungs (John
19:31-42). Burial marked the finality of
his life.
But he “rose
again on the third day.” (Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday are the 3 days.) This
is the heart of our faith. This is what
we celebrate at the Eucharist. Jesus the
man came back to life by the power of God, confirming his work of salvation as
God’s agent, the Messiah, on our behalf.
Further, he promises us a similar resurrection when he returns in his
glory as Son of God made man.
“He ascended
into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” This is symbolic language again, meaning that
this human being who is God at the same time is in complete union with God and
now rules of the universe with the authority to dispense grace and mercy to us. He assured his followers that he’d
return: “he will come again in glory,”
not as a newborn infant but as king of the universe, and he’ll complete his
mission of redemption by “judging the living and the dead,” i.e., every human
who’s ever lived. He’ll pass judgment on
each of us. He’ll dispense the justice
that so many people long for in this life but can’t attain. He’ll lead God’s friends into eternal life
(the kingdom of God), and he’ll allow God’s opponents to live in the eternal
alienation and hatred that they chose, with the Devil and his angels. In his earthly life he couldn’t compel the
chief priests and the other Jewish leaders to become his followers; neither can
he compel anyone on Judgment Day. Each
of us makes our own choice.
“This is our
faith. This is the faith of the
Church. We are proud to profess it in
Christ Jesus our Lord.”
No comments:
Post a Comment